


Perched headlong on the edge of boredom

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [25]
Category: Wiseguy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:35:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26085022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: Sonny loves Vinnie. No matter what.
Series: The Roadhouse Blues [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1069713





	Perched headlong on the edge of boredom

Sonny stood in the grungy men's room, staring into the toilet in the last stall. The water was going down, but nothing else; he should have pulled the tape out before he'd started this, but it was too late for that now; he wasn't retrieving the cassette just to make sure it went down, it could just stay there for all he cared. Unless Vinnie decided to retrieve it— No. It was too wet, it would short out the cassette player.

"What are you doing?" Vinnie, standing behind him. Sonny hadn't locked the stall door. "Is that my tape?"

"Not your tape, my tape. I bought it."

"I was listening to it!"

"Not any more." Sonny pushed him out of the way, left the stall, went to wash his hands.

"Hey! What the fuck are you doing?"

Sonny didn't know which made Vinnie madder, the tape or not getting an answer. Didn't matter; in combination they'd have him furious. Sonny kept not answering, trying to find a soap dispenser with some soap in it.

"I'm talking to you!"

"What else is new?" Sonny couldn't help himself. And there wasn't any soap. That just figured. He ran his hands under the lukewarm water that passed for hot, looked at the air dryer, and swore. Then he went over to Vinnie and wiped his wet hands on Vinnie's T-shirt. Vinnie pushed him, and Sonny swung on him, but they'd been doing this for so long it took extraordinary circumstances for either of them to connect on the first punch anymore. "If you've got any other psychotic music-to-go-insane-by in the car, you might as well bring it in here—" And Vinnie hit him. Which was exactly what Sonny wanted, though he didn't hit back. "Can we get going? I'm tired." And he turned and walked out of the men's room, back to the car, which was locked, and waited for Vinnie to come and unlock it.

"Will this be one check or two?" the waitress asked, and Sonny resisted an urge to say he couldn't believe he was eating at Denny's in the first place, he sure as hell wasn't paying for Vinnie's lunch, too.

"One," Vinnie answered by rote, because Sonny always paid, but Sonny was tired of paying.

"Yeah, it's his check," Sonny agreed, which got Vinnie's attention off the menu, anyway.

"What?"

"You're buying," Sonny said.

"Why am I buying? You're the one who wanted to stop for lunch."

"Fine, then go wait in the car while I eat my lunch."

The waitress looked a little nervous. Vinnie noticed that and started trying to explain, to smooth things over, which just pissed Sonny off even more.

"I'm tired of you mooching off me. You can buy my lunch for a change."

"Like hell I will!" The fact that every damn dollar Vinnie had on him had come from Sonny in the first place made no difference to either of them, and Sonny was delighted that Vinnie wasn't going to pull any of that let's-be-reasonable crap he usually did when he didn't want to hold up his side of an argument.

"Then you can go sit in the car," Sonny said, but he kept his voice down. **He** would be reasonable; **he** wouldn't cause a scene.

"I'm not— You can't just send me out to the car—" And then Vinnie threw down his menu and walked out of Denny's, leaving his coat behind, but his car keys were in his jeans pocket and in a minute the car started and he drove away. Sonny gave the waitress his order. How bad could they possibly screw up a BLT?

Vinnie came back not too long after Sonny finished his mediocre meal. He didn't say anything, didn't even come inside, but Sonny saw him pull up, and he went out and got in the car.

"You know something?" Vinnie asked, and Sonny ignored him. He pulled a cassette from its little plastic container and squinted at it, trying to read the contents. Vinnie had lost the paper insert probably as he was walking out of the store the day he bought it. It was dark in the car, and hard to read, and Sonny wasn't sure which tape it was, but it didn't really matter. It was one of Vinnie's, so he rolled down his window and tossed it out.

"You know something?" Vinnie repeated, more aggressively. Sonny still didn't answer him, and Vinnie made an exasperated sound. "Sartre had it all wrong."

"Who the fuck is Sartre?" Sonny asked, though he knew perfectly well: he was some kind of dead philosopher. He was asking to indicate his lack of interest, and so Vinnie wouldn't feel the need to tell him.

Vinnie either knew that or didn't care if Sonny knew who Sartre was because instead of telling him, he said, "Sartre said that hell is other people, but was wrong."

"Oh, yeah?" Sonny asked. "That sounds about right to me." He glanced briefly at another tape, took it out of its plastic box, and unspooled some of it before giving it its freedom by the side of the interstate. Sonny didn't know why he was saving the plastic boxes, though his first thought was that they hadn't done anything. It was the tapes that were driving him crazy. The tapes, and Vinnie. He'd dump the boxes when they got wherever they were going, which was nowhere.

"No, hell isn't other people. Hell is the lunatic sitting next to me, throwing the tapes he doesn't like out the window!"

"I'm not throwing the ones I don't like out," Sonny corrected him, pitching another tape.

"You're not," Vinnie said, as though he didn't believe him. "No, of course you're not, you're throwing out the ones I **do** like!"

"No, it's too dark to read the labels. I was just throwing them out randomly, **hoping** some of them are ones you like." Sonny laughed to himself and tossed another tape.

Vinnie yelled. It sounded like he was getting ready to run into a china shop and start breaking stuff. Sonny didn't even look at him, he just unspooled another cassette, this time making a big pile of shiny brown tape before lobbing the whole thing out the window.

"You don't even care if you're getting rid of ones you like, as long as— You don't care if you hurt yourself as long as you hurt me, right? Right?"

"Quit being so melodramatic," Sonny muttered. "They're just a bunch of tapes. Nobody's getting hurt."

"What if I just agreed not to play them?" Vinnie suggested. He sounded furious, and a little crazy, which made Sonny smile.

Sonny looked in the box. "It's too late now. There's only one left." He pulled out the last tape in the box and popped it into the player.

He knew which one this was; it still had its paper insert.

_A candy-colored clown they call the sandman—_

Vinnie yelled again, this time as though he was in real physical pain. It probably had something to do with hating the first track on this tape. It was hardly Sonny's favorite song by any means, but that was all right—Vinnie hating it was the important thing.

_Tiptoes to my room every nightJust to sprinkle stardust and to whisperGo to sleep. Everything is all right._

They struggled over the tape for a while, Vinnie trying to eject it, Sonny not letting him, and the car weaving all over the road. Other drivers leaned on their horns, and it was shortly after that that Vinnie stopped fighting with him about the tape and tried to push him out of the car while yelling something about there being no exit in sight.

Sonny couldn't decide if Vinnie was crazy or stupid or both. Crazy, probably, since he really wasn't stupid. Crazy made more sense, because who else but a crazy person would act like this?

Vinnie had been yelling at him when he finally ripped the tape out of the player and hurled it out the window, and he'd nearly run them off the road as he again tried to get the door open to push Sonny out after the tape.

And now he was trying to talk him into a blow job, which Sonny would have been dubious about even if things hadn't gotten crazy between them. Look how nuts-o Vinnie had gotten before when they'd been doing that. "Thanks, but no thanks." And the next thing he knew, Vinnie was getting in bed with him. Sonny didn't even think about it, he just pushed Vinnie out. "Go back to your own bed. Go to sleep."

"Will you just—"

"Shut up."

"Jesus, Sonny, I just offered to suck your dick, not push you off a roof. Don't freak out on me."

"This morning you tried to push me out of a moving car," Sonny said, and laughed. God, he loved Vinnie, loved him so much he couldn't think straight, you should pardon the expression. And it wasn't him that was freaking out, it was Vinnie, who every so often got this crazy idea that he was . . . that he was **gay**. Sonny could never understand how somebody so smart could get so confused so easily. Sonny knew Vinnie wasn't gay, but he couldn't figure out how to get that through to Vinnie, how to make it stick.

It didn't help that he was so damn good at it. And it didn't help that he always suggested it when Sonny was stressed out and could really use some instant relaxation.

Vinnie muttered something Sonny didn't understand. "What?"

"I said, either get over here or I'm going to wait until you're asleep and hold a pillow over your face!" And then he laughed in that helpless, bordering-on-hysterical way he did when he didn't seem to know what to say. Then he sighed. "What's the problem?"

"The problem is, you're either stupid or crazy," Sonny said.

"I'm either— **What**?"

"I don't know what's wrong with you, but every so often you get crazy like this. Earlier you were trying to push me out of a moving car on the highway, now you wanna give me a blow job. You tell me, is that stupid or is that crazy?"

"It's not— I'm not—" Vinnie yelled again, that incoherent sound he made whenever Sonny asked him a perfectly reasonable question he had no answer to. He took a deep breath. "Look. We're fighting all the time."

"Yeah?" Sonny didn't see the problem. Fighting was better than Vinnie staring off into space like he couldn't remember what planet he was on.

"I was trying—" Another deep breath. "We're both stressed out. I was hoping a blow job would help you relax."

"And what's it going to do for you?" Sonny asked. That was the truly weird thing, Vinnie expected no reciprocation. It made Sonny nervous. Nobody put out without expecting something in return. Usually it was either an orgasm or money, and Vinnie wasn't for sale.

"To keep me from killing you," Vinnie answered. "That's what I'm hoping, anyway."

You see? Crazy. "How is you giving me a blow job going to keep you from killing me?"

"Because if you stop acting like— If you stop acting the way you've been acting, I'll be able to relax, too."

"Acting like what?" Sonny asked. "How have I been acting?” He hadn't been acting any way at all.

"Like such a pain in the ass," Vinnie answered promptly, as though he'd been hoping Sonny would ask. "And I don't see what the problem is, unless you're worried that one more blow job is going to suddenly make you gay." He said it with that obnoxious I-dare-you voice he thought would get him his own way. 

Sonny ignored it. "It's not me I'm worried about, it's you."

"You're worried about **me**? What're you worried about **me** for?"

Sonny sat up and turned on the light. Vinnie was just standing in the middle of the floor, looking as lost as he had when Sonny first got him back in Brooklyn.

"What'm I worried about you for? Look at you, you're a mess."

"You sure you want the light on for this?"

"For **what**?" Sonny threw the covers off, got up, went over to Vinnie, grabbed him by the shoulders. "Will you please just go to bed, go to sleep?"

It might've been more effective if he hadn't had half a hard-on, if Vinnie hadn't laughed in his face, then pushed him, not hard but forcefully, against the wall, and dropped to his knees.

He was so damn good at this, Sonny sometimes thought about asking if he'd ever— But that wasn't something you asked a man, not even if the man in question was better with his mouth than even the priciest hooker. _And it's Vinnie. Do you really want to know if he ever had some other guy's dick in his mouth?_

No. This was Vinnie, and Sonny knew he'd never do anything like this with any other guy. He wasn't really **gay**.

But he was very good at this, and no matter how hard Sonny tried, he could never make it last very long, and when it was over all Sonny wanted to do was sleep a little bit. Back in his bed, under the covers, he was near to doing just that when he heard the springs of Vinnie's bed making a rhythmic squeak anyone would recognize: Vinnie was beating off.

Instead of falling asleep, Sonny lay with his eyes closed, listening. He'd heard this more than a time or two, but he always listened. It made him feel—

He didn't know what it made him feel, he just liked listening to Vinnie. When Vinnie was finished, Sonny waited a few minutes. There was something he wanted to ask him, but he wasn't sure what it was. "Hey, kid. You OK?"

Vinnie sort of laughed. "Yeah, Sonny, I'm fine."

It didn't exactly ease his mind, but it was the best he could do without starting something else.


End file.
